I like Twitter… but I want to love it. I think it has potential. I think it has plenty of untapped upside that just needs to be mined.

So if I were the Twitter CEO, here’s what I would do.

SWITCH FROM BEING A SOCIAL MEDIA SITE TO A “NOW ENGINE”

Several times in the last couple of months I’ve wanted to search something and when I go to Twitter’s home page, I’m met with this screen, which requires me to sign in to search…

I don’t mind signing in because I have an account and I’m usually near a computer (and I’m always signed in on my mobile). But there are times when I just wanted to quickly check something and I now had an extra step of first signing in before I could search.

By creating a home page like this, Twitter stakes its claim as a social media community first, rather than what it really is: A way for people to get a pulse on now.

That’s bland and less helpful… and there are only a small handful of trending words. And you only get to this page if you know about it.

The fix: I think Twitter’s main page should have a nice big constantly-changing picture (similar to what it has now) across the top 2/3rds of the page with a huge search line in the center for people to search.

Below the search line there should be a few user-friendly ways of sorting results:

And in the bottom third of the page, or perhaps on a long scroll below the fold, there should be dozens of themed flat-design boxes/cells/blocks that link to a live collection of tweets on a particular theme. Perhaps these could be auto-sorted (or user-sorted) by topic/theme, location, information type, most active, etc. For example, during an election, there might be a box for #election that people can click on to see a feed of election tweets.

ADD TUNING/MUTING FEATURES

Twitter allows you to make some minor adjustments to your feed by unfollowing or blocking someone. But I want more functionality here: I want to tune my Twitter feed much like I tune my Facebook feed. I sometimes want more of someone and less of someone else. But beyond people, I want to be able to tune topics as well: I sometimes want more of one topic and less of another topic.

It should be easy to do and something I can set ongoing or temporarily. (Ongoing for those annoying topics I don’t care about and temporarily for those times when I watch a NASCAR race that I’ve recorded on my PVR and don’t want to see the results of that race until I’m done.

IMPROVE DISCOVERY

Twitter has a “Who To Follow” and “Trends” section but these have always been pretty weak. Granted, you can find interesting people to follow using the search function but I think Twitter could do more. For example, when I click on the “more” button in a tweet…

… I should get options to find “people who are a lot like this person” or “people who follow this person also follow…”

MULTIPLE ACCOUNTS

I want to be able to create and manage multiple Twitter accounts from a single sign-in. Right now I have my own personal account @AaronHoos, a business account @REIcopywriter, plus a couple of accounts for clients. Each one has its own sign-in. Just give me one sign-in to manage all of them.

LINK PREVIEW

When someone posts a link in their page, I want to see a preview of that link, maybe similar to how Facebook “embeds” an image of the site, or perhaps in a fly-out. Give me more info about the site before I click to it so I know what I’m clicking to.

I’ve got a few other ideas that need further refinement before I post them but let’s start with these, please Twitter!